Coulson's Menagerie
by EdgeofDarkness
Summary: Six times Coulson said "No." to the Avengers having a pet, and the one time he wasn't allowed to. (Rating is for Tony Stark's excessive swearing.)
1. Thor

Chapter One: Thor

**I don't own the Avengers, nor do I make any profits from this work. **

Coulson sipped his morning coffee and let out a relaxed sigh as he did so. He'd been a bit worried, in the beginning, about how life would go once he moved into Avengers Mansion (formally Stark Manor). Aside from times the team got called out on missions (which was thankfully more rare than he'd thought it would be, but still more frequent than he cared for), and a few memorable drinking parties he'd had to put an end to, and the regular bickering of Tony and _everyone else_, he had a fairly easy job.

He wasn't sure how the group would fit together (never mind that they'd been living together for nearly two months before he'd been released from the hospital—and oh, that was not a fun meeting when they found out) but aside from a few small hiccups, they lived together very easily.

It helped that they all followed the rules, of course. Well, as much as six superheroes could, anyway.

He took another drink of his coffee and turned to his paperwork with a faint, pleasant smile.

That was wiped off his face when Thor came crashing through the kitchen, chasing after something small and yellow.

Coulson watched for a good ten minutes until Thor had caught the thing—which turned out to be a very angry _lion cub_ of all things.

"Thor," He started, putting his coffee and paperwork safely aside. "Where did you get a lion cub?"

Thor gave him a slightly guilty look (One of the rules that they were supposed to follow was no pets, after all), and then held out the still spitting cub with a sheepish smile.

"He is Njord. Is he not a fierce beast, for his size? He will grow to be even fiercer!" The lion cub sunk his claws into Thor's finger at the statement, and Thor bit back a swear word and gently removed the claws. Coulson could see more than a few marks on Thor's hands, arms, and face that he could guess the source of.

"Where did you get him?" He asked again, keeping his tone patient.

Thor hesitated—which told Coulson he knew he'd done wrong—before hanging his head. "I met a very nice man while I was walking in the park a few nights past. He was a bit odd, but Tony assures me that most Midgardians are." He paused to change his hold on the cub—Njord—so that he had a bit more trouble clawing his fingers. "He offered to sell me a valiant beast and I paid him and got Njord."

Coulson pinched the bridge of his nose and resisted the urge to sigh.

An easy job, indeed.

"Thor, you can't own a lion cub." Thor _pouted_ at him, but Coulson firmly ignored it. "I'll call around to find a local zoo or something to take…Njord…in. You can visit him there." Thor brightened a bit at that and Coulson instructed him to find a safe place for the cub.

He drank down the rest of his coffee, which had gone cold, after Thor and the little yellow beast left, and shook his head.

"Time to make some calls." He murmured, before he took out his phone and started looking for a zoo.


	2. Clint

Two; Clint

The next pet incident happened a week later, and Coulson had the sinking feeling that it wasn't something that was going to go away on its own. He was reminded of Fury telling him that he was going to be a super nanny, dealing with adult children. He'd laughed him off, at the time.

Now, staring at his favorite agent and his…pet…he regretted laughing.

"Why, Barton?" Coulson couldn't help the exasperation that leaked into his voice, and Clint looked appropriately sheepish.

Unlike Thor's lion cub incident a week prior, the entire team happened to be present. They'd just gotten back from a mission, and Coulson was ready to congratulate his team on a job well done when he'd turned and found a small, brown, fur covered eighth member.

Tony was smirking, though tiredly, with Bruce passed out on his shoulder. Natasha was staring and looking bored, which she might well have been. Thor was looking very firmly at the ground, managing to look like a giant scolded child, still, and Steve was watching Barton's pet with rapt interest.

"Well, sir…there were all those animals they set loose. And this little one got trampled." He gently petted the side of the baby kangaroo's neck, and Phil sighed. The rampaging animals had been a mild surprise—mild, because they were in a zoo, of all things, fighting some eco-group that had managed to get some Chitauri tech on their sides.

"Why did you bring it home?" He really should have expected it, though. Barton grew up in a circus, and Coulson _knew_ he'd taken care of the animals as a child. He should have expected it. But at the same time, he thought that a grown man would know better.

He was so tired of being wrong.

"I couldn't leave her there, sir. She's so little, and they'd corralled most of the animals already," Most, because some where still running loose on busy streets, "so I had no idea where her mother was. Her leg is broken." He pointed out the obviously hastily done cast as if that made it all right.

Coulson really wished he could just smack a palm to his forehead, but knew that the team would, somehow, take that the wrong way, and God only knew what they'd bring home next time.

He blamed himself, a bit, for assuming that the team could make it home unsupervised. He'd stayed behind to talk to a few SHIELD agents about the tech, and had let the team take the QuinJet without him. It wasn't a terribly long ride back to the Mansion, after all.

He regretted that, now.

"You're not a vet, Barton." He was careful to keep calling Clint by his surname so that he knew how upset Coulson was. And just as Coulson hoped, Clint's eyes fell to the animal in his lap.

"I know, sir. I just…there was a 'roo at the circus when I was younger and I helped raise it and…I'm not going to get to keep her, am I?" He sounded so pitiful that Coulson had to close his eyes when he pinched the bridge of his nose to keep from looking at him.

"No, Barton. You're not. I'm going to call the zoo's management and have them come and pick her up. Tonight." He heard Clint sigh but when he looked he was nodding, if sadly, so Coulson knew he'd won.

He turned to leave the room to place the call—and contemplate his life choices just a bit—when he heard Tony, with a horrible Australian accent, say, "Crickey, Barton. A 'roo?"

The sound of someone—Natasha most likely—hitting him and the indignant noise of pain that followed made Phil give a hopeless headshake.

Super nanny indeed.


	3. Tony

Three; Tony

"Stark." Coulson's sharp voice was met with a groan, so he repeated himself a bit louder.

"Fuck. What?" Tony didn't move from under his pile of blankets—one of the few times he'd made it to bed after a bender—and Coulson rolled his eyes, since no one was watching.

He strode forward and tugged the blankets down, completely ignoring the fact that Tony was only wearing boxers—Captain America boxers at that, and oh Coulson wished he could use those as blackmail, but he owned a pair, too—and the squawk that Tony made when the cooler air hit him.

"Damn, Agent Agent. You wanna get in my bed that much you only have to ask." Tony wasn't even looking when he said it, so Coulson allowed himself another eye roll.

"Stark. Why is there a hawk in the living room?" He kept his voice at the pleasant, soft tone that he _knew_ freaked Tony out, and just as he'd hoped, Tony's back straightened even if he didn't move the arm from his eyes or sit up.

"Um…Hawkeye's watching TV…?" Coulson briefly wondered if he'd get away with tazing him for that. He decided that he probably would, but it wouldn't be worth listening to Tony whine later.

"Why is there a _red-tailed hawk_ sitting on a _perch_ in the living room, Stark?" It'd been two weeks since the kangaroo thing with Clint, and Coulson had hoped that the animal-craze was over.

_That_ got Tony to bolt into a sitting position, though he groaned a minute later. He was grinning, too, though, so Coulson just frowned at him.

"Oh shit, I actually did it?" He burst into a fit of laughter and hunched over his knees.

Coulson took a deep, steadying breath. "What did you do, Stark?"

Tony kept laughing for a solid minute before he caught his breath enough to say, "Well, you took Clint's kangaroo away! So I bought him a more appropriate pet!" Before promptly dissolving into laughter again.

Coulson could feel the headache coming on.

With Tony, though, that wasn't new.

"Return it." He said it in that pleasant tone again, and Tony stopped laughing right away.

He fixed a fake pout on his face. "But Agent Agent, Clint-y Pie will get sad!"

Coulson fixed a glare on his face and took another breath. To taze or not to taze. "Clint will get offended and think it's a joke, or he'll use his knowledge of falconry and birds of prey to attack you with it. Or your leather arm chairs. Probably both."

Tony lost some his mirth at that and rolled his eyes before he shrugged. "Fine, whatever. Be a fun-sucker, then. Jarvis should have the number. I was seriously plastered last night, I don't know where I got it."

"_Shall I dial, Agent Coulson?" _Jarvis asked, crisp voice of reason like a balm to Coulson's fraying nerves.

"Yes please, Jarvis." He was glad he wasn't going to have to make the call, this time. He was a bit tired of calling around for exotic pets that his gaggle of heroes brought home.

He let himself out of Tony's room and let himself feel a bit relieved. The members of the team most likely to bring things home already had, so he was fairly certain Tony's hawk would be the last time he'd have to deal with an animal-related issue.


	4. Natasha

Four; Natasha

Coulson rubbed his temple and wondering just why he had to be proven wrong time and time again. He'd died, he figured the universe at least owed him something. Apparently not.

"Natasha." He couldn't keep the exasperation out of his voice, and he knew trying wouldn't help with her. As it was, she merely quirked one elegant eyebrow at him.

"His name is Rurik." At the name, the half-robot-half-Doberman wagged it's mechanical tail.

"Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't that…thing…part of the last attack the Avengers fought off?" And of course, he wasn't wrong. The last maniac-turned-super villain they'd fought had used cyborg animals as his main attack force.

"No, he was. Tony and Bruce reprogrammed him." She waved her hand lazily at the two scientists who were slouching on the couch with Clint, watching horrible reality TV.

"Right." He paused, unsure of how to continue. Natasha, he knew, could and would shoot down all of his arguments with carefully thought out counter-arguments until he was too fed up to deal with her anymore. "Why did you bring it home?"

She reached out a hand and delicately rubbed the top of the thing's head, scratching it behind its remaining dog-ear. "I thought he was cute."

"We have no idea how he works, Natasha." Because, as far as he was aware, the SHIELD team assigned with figuring it out hadn't made much headway due to the strange nature of the tech. As it was, they believe it was based on, or made from, Chitauri tech.

"Let's just skip over how fucked up it is that you think that monster is cute, though." Tony's voice cut in, filled his mirth, and Coulson let himself sigh.

"Stark, shut up." Natasha paused in her petting of the dog and looked back at Coulson. "We know enough about he works to reprogram him from death-dog to harmless."

"He's harmless?" Because Coulson couldn't believe that, looking at it. It was looking at Tony, though, watching him with one real eye and one robotic one. Coulson had watched similar dogs shoot lasers out of their robotic eyes, so he was understandably wary.

"Perfectly. He even knows tricks." She proceeded to run him though the aforementioned tricks, making him sit, lay down, shake, and roll over before Coulson could say anything. "And he can speak. Speak, Rurik."

The dog-robot-thing panted for a moment before it barked. The bark turned from a slightly mechanical sounding low-pitched dog bark to a higher-pitch, and before Coulson really knew what was happening, the windows in the room shattered.

Tony, Bruce, and Clint were on the ground swearing and Natasha had thrown herself off the chair he'd been seated in to avoid the glass. Coulson stood up from his crouch behind the counter—and why all these happened in the kitchen/living room was beyond him—and stared hard at Natasha.

"Harmless." He said, and his voice brooked no argument. She sighed and shrugged her shoulders, and Coulson went about putting in a call to SHIELD.

Fury was going to _love_ this one.


	5. Bruce

Five; Bruce

Coulson looked up at the tentative knock on his door, wondering why Bruce would be visiting so soon after a mission. They'd just come back from battling bots in Florida, and everyone was tired. Bruce normally just passed out for the night—or day or two—after a mission. And Coulson knew it was Bruce just by the knock; Clint and Natasha just walked in, comfortable as you please, though they rarely visited him in his suite. Tony barged in, the door banging off the wall, but only when he was irked at Coulson, or Fury, or SHIELD, and nothing had happened in the two hours since they'd returned for him to be irked at. Steve's knock was polite but strong, and Coulson would know it anywhere. Bruce, though, had only ever knocked on his door once, at that was back at the beginning of their time cohabitating, to ask him to join them for dinner. Thor had never visited his rooms.

Coulson called for Bruce to enter, but didn't stop changing from his ruined suit. Honestly, falling into the ocean, of all things. And he'd just had it cleaned, too.

The burn along the back of the jacket didn't help matters, either.

"Agent?" Bruce's voice was hesitant, and Coulson could picture him standing in the doorway, one hand still on the knob, looking ready to bolt backwards. When he came out of his room in a soft t-shirt and sweatpants, he wasn't wrong.

"Is there something I can help you with, Bruce?" He made it a point to be familiar with the team, though everyone called him Coulson—minus Tony, who mainly called him Agent Agent, of course.

Bruce looked sheepish and rubbed the back of his neck with the hand that wasn't holding onto the doorknob.

"Um, yeah. I…there's a sea turtle in my bathtub." Coulson stared for a long, silent moment, weariness making his thoughts slow.

"A sea turtle." He repeated, just to be sure. Bruce gave a slow nod. Coulson resisted the urge to bang his head on the nearest hard surface. It seemed, despite the almost three weeks, that the animal issue hadn't gone away.

"I think the Other Guy brought him back. Or, well, I know he did. I watched the footage. He, um, wanted a pet, I guess?" Bruce sounded so sorry that Coulson let his shoulders slump before he settled onto the couch in his living room.

"It's fine, Bruce. I'll call around tomorrow to find a place to take it in." He paused, though, seeing Bruce still hesitating. "There isn't going to be a problem, is there? If we get rid of it?"

Bruce shook his head quickly. "No, no. I doubt he'll notice." He still hesitated, though, and Coulson quirked an eyebrow at him. Bruce shuffled his feet again before he seemed to steel his courage. "I remember you getting burned, sir. But you didn't get looked at by medical, did you?"

If he was anyone else Coulson would have gaped. He knew Bruce remembered flashes of things from his time as the Hulk, but he'd never thought that the big green beast would pay him any mind on the field. He was Phil Coulson, though, so he just gave a small headshake.

"They aren't bad." He assured Bruce, but Bruce still stayed in the doorway, and Coulson finally allowed himself a sigh before he gripped the bottom of his shirt to haul it over his head. Once shirtless he turned his back to Bruce and gestured to where he could feel the slight sting of a burn on one of his shoulder blades. "Go ahead." He said, because he knew Bruce well enough to know that he wanted to fuss over his wounds, to help him heal in any way he could.

He thought he heard Bruce murmur a soft 'thank you' before he approached, pulling a jar of salve from his pocket.

Sometimes, Coulson thought as Bruce gently worked over the burns that were a bit worse than he'd thought, it wasn't so bad, being a super-nanny.


	6. Steve

Six; Steve

Sugar Glider

SHIELD Agents were taught a number of things through their years in training, by operatives older and more experienced than they themselves were. And then, when they became field agents themselves (always assuming, of course, that that was the path they chose to take), they were taught even more things by the outside world and their own experiences. But one thing held true in all their teachings; never show your fear.

There was, more likely than not, a list somewhere of all things a proper SHIELD agent wasn't supposed to do. (Living with superheroes was probably on that list, if only for health reasons.) Showing your fear was one thing that every agent could agree was on the list, whether it existed or not.

Most would also, if asked, probably agree that squealing like a little girl was probably also on the "Do Not Do" list.

Of course, Coulson was fairly capable at ignoring the rules when it suited him.

Though he would later deny that he _did not scream like a little girl, thank you_.

As it was, though, he _did_ scream when a fuzzy brown _something_ landed on his shoulder and made a noise in his ear. All he could think of was rats, swarming everywhere, spreading disease and biting and being generally disgusting.

Thanks to his honed reflexes, he sent the _thing_ flying across the room, where it shrieked and disappeared into the couch cushions. Coulson grabbed for his gun on pure terror filled reflex but found the holster missing; he didn't carry in the mansion. (The urge to shoot Tony or Clint was too much temptation, even for him.)

Just as he risked a glance to the side to look for another weapon, preferably something he could throw from on top of the counter, Steve hurried into the kitchen, looking around frantically.

"Are you okay sir? I heard you scream." He put both his hands on Coulson's shoulders and squeezed, and Coulson found himself calming, as he normally did whenever his childhood hero-turned-friend was near him.

"I—yes. I'm fine. There was a…a thing. A rat, or something." And though he _hated_ to admit that a rat made him, a hardened SHIELD agent shriek like that, Coulson was more concerned with finding and getting rid of it and any of its little friends that it no doubt had brought with it.

Steve stared at Coulson, and then glanced behind him into the living room, and then he burst out laughing. Coulson stiffened and Steve felt it through his grip on Coulson's shoulders, and his laughter instantly died. "Oh, no, I wasn't laughing at you. It's just, that's not a rat. That's a sugar glider. His name is Sid. I…erm…adopted him. From that shelter that I volunteer at twice a week? The small animal one. He just…he looked so lonely." Steve eventually trailed off because Coulson was glaring at him—something he'd never done and normally reserved for Tony or Clint.

"No, Steve." Coulson didn't _care_ if it wasn't a rat. It was rat-like. And, "I've already said no to _every other member of this team_ having a pet. Including the Hulk. I can't allow you to keep it. It wouldn't be fair." Never mind that _Steve_ of all people had snuck an animal in under his nose. Steve, who was supposed to follow the rules when no one else did. Coulson felt like curling into a ball and crying at the unfairness of it.

And okay, maybe his nerves were still a little shot from the sugar glider attacking him.

Steve ducked his head and whistled, and the little rat that wasn't a rat came gliding towards his outstretched hand. Coulson stepped back and tried to keep from flinching.

"I'll take him back now, then. Sorry about the trouble he caused you, sir." Coulson sighed. At least Steve had the decency to hide his pout from him. Coulson wasn't sure he could resist it.

"Steve…maybe someday, once we're all settled in a bit better, we can see about getting a communal pet. Something everyone agrees on. No birds of prey or exotic animals or cyborg-things. Something nice. Something normal. But not for a little while, yet." Coulson kept his tone gentle and Steve nodded along, a slow, soft smile building the more Coulson talked. "Besides, we can't endanger an animal by having it live here. Clint still shoots real arrows at Tony when they drink, and Thor forgets not to call Mjolner from several floors away. It wouldn't be safe." Steve chuckled a bit and agreed, and Coulson was just glad when he and the sugar glider left.

Coulson hung his head and wondered if he'd ever have to make good on that promise. Not likely, since it really wasn't safe for an animal around the house and they never knew when they would have to take off on various missions, not to mention Thor went home occasionally, Steve volunteered across the city at a hundred different things, and Tony and Bruce forgot the world existed on a regular basis.

Really, they just weren't the pet type.


End file.
